2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (hereinafter referred to as TCDD) is generally recognized as a toxic member of a family of compounds that occur as inadvertent environmental contaminants. The suspected and/or known health effects of these compounds are so severe that analytical methods for their determination in human blood serum need to reach parts-per-quadrillion (10.sup.-15) levels (femtograms per milliliter of serum). Presently utilized processes are both slow and expensive, because of the difficulty in extracting such small amounts of TCDD with reasonable recovery and the tedious nature of the processes used to remove materials other than TCDD that interfere with analysis.
In prior art processes, the extraction of TCDD from blood serum and removal of interfering contaminants are generally performed as separate steps, typically requiring from several hours to several days to accomplish. Prior attempts to simultaneously extract and purify TCDD from biological fluids have been unable to provide a TCDD precursor which did not require additional, tedious purification, because of the simultaneous extraction of other biological components and contaminants.